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08:01 AM PST on Wednesday, November 5, 2003
SEATTLE - Investigators once pegged the Green River Killer's murderous
frenzy as lasting from 1982 to 1984. They now know defendant Gary
Ridgway's violent streak started long before that - and continued long
after, a source involved in the case has told The Associated Press.
A court document being released Wednesday, when Ridgway is expected to
plead guilty to killing 48 women, shows that more than a decade before
he strangled his first Green River victim, Ridgway stabbed and seriously
wounded a little boy, the source said on condition on anonymity.
And two of the killings Ridgway will take responsibility for came in
1990 and 1998 - years after the last official victim, the source said.
The more-than-80-page document also describes how Ridgway had sex with
his dead victims, the source said.
When Ridgway is done entering his pleas, he will have more convictions on his record than any other serial killer in the nation's history. He is scheduled to be sentenced to life in prison without parole in January.
Unlike Ridgway's later victims, the boy he stabbed survived. A first-grader at the time - 1966 or early 1967 - the victim now lives in California, the source said.
Details of the attack were confirmed by another person involved in the case.
The stabbing came 16 years before the start of the Green River serial killings, which targeted women in the Seattle area, mainly runaways and prostitutes. The first victims turned up in the Green River in south King County, giving the killer his name.
Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the King County Prosecutor's Office, declined to comment on any aspect of Wednesday's proceedings.
In an AP interview on Tuesday, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert said he and King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng spent Sunday, Monday and Tuesday meeting with victims' relatives.
"It's a very emotional time not only for the families, but for our investigators," Reichert said. "This dredges up all kinds of visions and memories that are not pleasant at all. It's been a dark cloud over this entire region."
Ridgway, 54, of the south Seattle suburb of Auburn, was arrested Nov. 30, 2001, as he left his longtime job as a painter at Kenworth Truck Co. Prosecutors said advances in DNA technology had allowed them to match a saliva sample taken from Ridgway in 1987 with DNA samples taken from the bodies of three of the earliest victims.
Ridgway eventually pleaded not guilty to seven of the murders. But facing the death penalty, he began cooperating with investigators last summer. He confessed to 42 of the 49 killings officially attributed to the Green River Killer, as well as six others.
He also directed investigators to four sets of previously undiscovered remains.
Ridgway is still a suspect in the seven remaining cases on the original list of 49 because any denials he has made in those cases have been "equivocal," sources have told The AP. His agreement with prosecutors stipulates that he will continue cooperating for six months.
Because at least one of those cases involves a woman whose body was found in Oregon - which has the death penalty - he theoretically could face execution there.
Ridgway had been a suspect since 1984, when victim Marie Malvar's boyfriend reported that he last saw her getting into a pickup truck later identified as Ridgway's.
But Ridgway told police he didn't know Malvar. A police investigator in Des Moines, midway between Seattle and Tacoma, who knew Ridgway, cleared him as a suspect. Later that year, Ridgway contacted the King County sheriff's Green River Task Force - ostensibly to offer information about the case - and passed a polygraph test.
Detectives continued to suspect him, however, and in 1987 they searched his house and took the saliva sample that would eventually link him to the killings.
Court documents released at the time of Ridgway's arrest indicated that many of the spots where bodies were found were in or near areas where Ridgway had sex with his second wife. The couple divorced in 1981.
